


Self-Defense in Advance

by mayakovsky



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asexuality, Character Study, F/M, Genderswap, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-18
Updated: 2012-05-18
Packaged: 2017-11-05 14:11:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/407317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayakovsky/pseuds/mayakovsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft was seven the first time she worried about Sherlock, a tiny pink ugly thing he was, so soft, and quite suddenly she was very aware of all the dangerous things in the world. All the things that not only could harm, but were intent upon doing so. She's thirty six when she first notices the effect this stress has on her. Mycroft is Atlas, of sorts, a government, a sphere of lives resting on the space between her shoulder blades. In the mirror, the sag and sallow of her face alarms her the moment she pauses to study. She looks...old. She at once looks fifty and thirty two, more lines and pronounced gray hair the only things properly missing. She has perhaps always looked this age, somewhere between young and old, for years now, but it's only just now she properly pays attention to it. Mycroft lets her hand drift across her cheek for a second longer before popping open the medicine cabinet and carrying on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Self-Defense in Advance

**Author's Note:**

> There is very, very brief of slight non consensual activity, mentioned in a sentence, mentions of suicide, and talk of drug use and overdosing.

Mycroft is taught at seven that if you can't be beautiful, you should be thin, and if you can't be either, you should be smart. Mummy is gorgeous and long and has the same curled dark hair of which her little brother Sherlock sports a tuft atop his soft head. Mycroft looks to her father, tall as well but thick at the middle with her same long and slightly crooked nose and sharp eyes, and knows that life will not be kind to her, because she will not be beautiful.

 

 

At eleven, Mycroft has long, bone-straight brown hair, ordinary in every way, that she twists in to quick and messy braids. "You ought to curl it, no one will like that mess," Mummy comments while raking fingers through a particularly rough tangle; Mycroft winces. The next day, she takes a ten pound note from her "bank" (a cigar box she salvaged from the bins that her father had tossed out) and stays in town after school, chin held high and jaw set with determination as she watches the barber snip snip snip away. When it barely brushes the back of her neck and the weight of it is gone, her hair curls around in waves that wrap against her chin. It isn't at all flattering, but she keeps the style well in to her teens because she looks less feminine, and she likes it.

Mycroft takes German after her father declares it to be too rough a language for a girl to learn, tells her that French will be nice and the other girls in her year are taking it. German is rough, yes, but it has a lovely softness to it, a politeness that no one cares to understand, the passivity, the verb in complex sentences always at the end of the sentence, forcing people to listen. To wait. People pay attention to her in German, hands folded, eyes bright, and civil arguments about school systems and foreign affairs and morals make her want to melt the way sillier things do sillier girls. She slides her teeth along the common 'ch' sound to grind out the ridges, smooths 'en' with her tongue against the top of her mouth, and she enjoys herself.

She learns that men respond better to aggression when she puts on a tone as sweet as treacle tart, so disgusting and thick and peppered with "love"s and "dear"s that she wants to wash it out of her mouth with salt water. They like the sound, it reminds them of flirting, of breathy moans, and it hurts Mycroft's throat but she does it anyway.

Too late she discovers that some prefer the aggression, the firm voice, the sharp and glinting eyes, and she tries to blend the two but fails, time and time again, only comes up with condescending and weary and 'bitch' and 'prude' and decides to abandon the endeavor.

 

 

At seventeen, a hand goes too far around her hip, fingers pressing up the hem of her skirt, she's pinned to a wall by someone far wider than her. Despite knowing that boys are easier to deal with when they have something to look at, she goes home with tear-blurred eyes and throws away every skirt in the wardrobe.

"What're you doing, Mycroft?" Sherlock is ten, and brilliant, blindingly brilliant, so the question stops her in her tracks - the formality of an icebreaker, because Sherlock usually has no time for such wasteful nonsense in a way that makes her smile behind her hand before reprimanding him for being rude.

Mycroft spreads her fingers wide and presses her last wool skirt in to the bin, then sits on her bed; Sherlock follows without invitation, managing to burrow in to her side without _actually_ doing so. "Women aren't objects to squeeze when you want to," she says carefully after a moment, placing a hand on top of his head and giving the hair as long as her own a good shake. "Do you understand that? You aren't to forget it."

 

 

Mummy kills herself during Mycroft's Christmas holiday when she's twenty. The official report, the newspapers, they say that Violet Holmes was driven off the road as she skid on ice and slammed in to a tree, horn blaring. What they will never say is that Siger Holmes never slept in their bed anymore, that he would lock the door to his study, that he threw his money about like he thought that was truly taking care of his wife and children. That Violet Holmes patiently scrubbed the scent of perfume and smudges of lurid red lipstick from the sleeves and collars of his shirt. Much in the same way that Mycroft was never beautiful when compared to her, Violet Holmes felt old and used and wrinkled and fat when put side by side with the women she never saw. No newspaper wrote that Sherlock had stood up at dinner and declared that his father was stupid for ignoring Mummy, and that his latest was too young. Mycroft had stood immediately to take the force of his hand against her shoulder, herding away Sherlock to the library.

"You ought to think before you say things, Sherlock."

"I did think," Sherlock stubbornly continued, and no newspaper prints that Mycroft smiled and shook her head.

"At least she won't harp on and on about your diet anymore," Sherlock whispers at the wake, huffing as he strips away his tie and unbuttons the top of his shirt, leaving it flared around his neck. Mycroft says nothing, adjusts her shawl as it falls around her arm, doesn't wiggle from her too-tight heels or pull the pin from her tight bun, because this is a funeral and you have to be _respectful_.

There's no use in telling him that her voice will continue to ring in her ears at every meal, has done so for years.

Doors unlock at the names Holmes that wouldn't have even been closed were she a man, but Mycroft had long ago resigned herself to the idea that nothing would be as easy for her as it will for Sherlock once he's older. Now, though, now she argues with men twice her age and she doesn't have to twist her words in sugar the way she once did.

 

 

At twenty three, Mycroft muses that entire civilizations lived and died for sex and women who pulled men to their knees and - well. She's under no illusion that she would bring anyone to their knees, but the idea is intriguing. The power, the push and pull - physically as well - the symbolism of it all. She had always loved a good symbol.

It doesn't last very long. She decides that the momentary pleasure of sex isn't worth the humiliation, the sweat, the ache and the hurt and the distance it drives between people. It isn't worth letting another's eyes drag across her too-large hips or her soft waist, letting another human closer to her than she wants to allow them.

 

 

Mycroft only properly cries two times in her life. Neither of them are at the death of family members. One of them is the night Sherlock leaves after he sets a pile of their father's papers on fire in his office, three months after he's died. In the ashes are the remains of his birth certificate, and his testamur from Oxford. Mycroft, twenty-nine and smart, alone, powerful, manipulative, all the things she had been taught that women were not to be, sweeps tears from her eyelashes at the first report from her surveillance that Sherlock surfaces in Paris, then Brussels, Prague - he smokes, then her surveillance man can't look her in the eye as he mentions needles.

She clears her throat and breathes quickly through her teeth, shuffling the papers together on her desk and giving a nearly imperceptible sigh before picking up the phone because, well, France is waiting on her word, and being buried in work has a slightly heavier connotation for Mycroft but it's all the same. It's easier to hate herself for being weak when Korean election officials are being bribed and murdered.

"I'm fine," Sherlock insists, three months later.

"Laissez-moi." _Leave me alone._

"Hör auf damit." _Stop it._

Sherlock throws his phone in rivers, out the windows of trains, lays one down in front of the wheel of a cab in Greece, but Mycroft always calls.

She does it because she knows it tethers Sherlock to her, keeps him tied to her wrist like a balloon, and he's an adult but she still feels responsible for him - though now it isn't just his toys that break, that rip, that tear. It's his bones he shatters, falling from windows or jumping out of them after others, his mind that he pulls apart like thick black tar that just seeps back in to place.

It's enough to break a heart, and were Mycroft not so cold, were she not distant and prudish, were she not every adverb ever applied to her, perhaps she would have broken by now but as it is, it's hard enough to watch. When Sherlock comes back to London after three years, Mycroft's subtle hands make sure that the first flat he looks at is well within his price range, replaces the lock before he knows that it's broken, and her assistant one day pauses at the entrance to her study, hand on the heavy door as if to swing it in front of her body like sudden protection.

"Surely there are...much better ways to spend your favours," Anthea says.

"My brother will one day soon tear himself apart and bite anyone who attempts to touch a shard before he picks it up. I'd at least rather watch than..." She stops, a hand smoothing through her artificial curls. Than what? Than not be able to see at all? She had always been the one to piece back together the things that Sherlock broke, had once even given him her viola bow because he'd cut too much of the strung hair of his own by the frog. Some day, everything had shifted one inch to the left and there was no glue, any more, that would piece together the things Sherlock broke.

"Than let him go at it alone. That'll be all, thank you, Anthea."

 

 

Greg Lestrade is forty two when he climbs in to the armored black car that rolls in front of his path at a crime scene. Mycroft delights in a bit of the dramatic every now and then, has the detective taken to an empty car park.

"Look, if you're going to kill me, you might as well just put a bullet in my head now and be done with it." Lestrade stands aggressively, feet as wide apart as his shoulders, and Mycroft has no doubt that the hand inching across the smooth front of his jacket is itching for the gun he owns but rarely fires.

"There are much more pleasing ways of being rid of unpleasant people, detective, and I assure you - if I found you so, you wouldn't be here." Her smile is the disgustingly sweet one that she mixed with vinegar at age twenty, the one she flashes at cheating business men, at the American senator who takes her intern in to the bathroom for a quick shag as if Mycroft wouldn't notice - as if Mycroft misses anything in her own office. It's the dangerous and polite smile that says she knows everything about the person it's being turned on.

Lestrade squares his shoulders. He tightens his jaw. His eyebrows raises only slightly, only enough for her to see standing ten feet away, and she's suddenly very pleased, the feeling blossoming throughout her.

"How do you know Sherlock Holmes?" Of course Mycroft knows, the teacher throwing out questions to the class to drag them along, make them keep up, make them see the smaller parts of the big picture.

"An acquaintance."

"Don't, detective. I already know you've collaborated with Sherlock on several of your cases in the past three months. I know he's told you never to give him credit." Mycroft wrinkles her nose, her father's long and crooked nose. "I know he's got it in to his head that he's some...consultant."

Lestrade leans forward, hands now deep in his pockets, and she catches this, smiles at him.

"Please don't - we both know you don't fire that weapon near enough to be comfortable using it now. Besides, I'm absolutely no harm to you, I only..." The umbrella Mycroft carries, her own version of an oral fixation, a transference of twisting and tugging on a strand of hair after Mummy had slapped her fingers and told her not to, swings up a few inches, then back, scraping on the pavement to stop. "Sherlock Holmes is not to collaborate on any of your cases until he's clean, Lestrade, and I will know."

Mycroft is thirty five when Lestrade's stare wraps itself around her in a way no one has ever quite managed since Sherlock cared to probe deeper - no one pays attention to her, tinted windows and umbrellas and keeping careful check to remove her name from the press, remove her existence from record before she allows things to be filed away and copied and sent off. Lestrade looks at Mycroft and _understands_ , and gives a curt nod.

"I can't promise you it'll be an easy thing to do, but every offered clinic, every available rehab..." a small frown, "My brother has learned to pick locks and disable the most moderate of security systems with alarming speed."

Lestrade snorts, turns away from Mycroft slightly, and the moment is gone - she feels less uncomfortable by that stare, what he probably has adopted as his interrogation stare. She may as well have dreamed it up. "Trust me, that I know. Come in to work in the morning to find the bastard sitting at my desk, picking through my files, more times than I want to let security know."

Mycroft adopts a smirk - her most carefully planned smirk - and puckers her lips a bit, watching the tip of her umbrella as she swings it like a pendulum. "Emergency exit in the Forensics lab. You'll find traces of chewing gum in the latch."

She turns curtly and walks away, Lestrade cursing not quietly so under his breath.

 

 

It's another seven months before Sherlock will talk to Mycroft. Five months before he initiates, and were Mycroft a lesser woman, it would break her heart. Sherlock, a perpetual heartache, though she never says it aloud. She understands, moderately, understands to a small degree, what it's like, the things that are painted on the walls of Sherlock's mind. Breathing is never enough, sleep is not nearly enough reprieve from the thinking, the constant thinking, the whirling and the vibrating of a computer at rest - never fully off. Never done. Always updating. Mycroft exhausts her mind with politics, tires it out with geography and threats and economics and some evenings and well in to these nights, slumped in to the most comfortable office chair that money could afford her, she feels as though she were scrubbed with sandpaper until raw.

It's one of these nights, head swimming with Russian threats and illegal testing and foreign languages, at the age of thirty six, Mycroft discovers she has a propensity toward baking.

Her kitchen is gorgeous and, falling in to the oft sad reality of gorgeous things, rarely used. The lights flicker twice before coming to life, a faint hum buzzing across the floor and through the air from the glistening appliances.

She pulls everything in the cabinets down, her crisp white button up rolled messily at the elbows and the collar undone, and she lines the ingredients on the counter like a police line-up, twisting every label until it faces her. She mixes from memory, from watching the rare occasions that Mummy would take to the kitchen - always birthdays, Christmases, seldom few other times during the year. It had always been a treat to watch her bake, Mycroft dropping her school bag automatically in the dining room and dashing to the counter (later, a more restrained gait, however much quickened by the promise of a batter-soaked spoon).

With eyes closed, Mycroft levels out flour, baking soda, pinches of salt twisted and ground between her fingers. It's in the beats and pulses of the electric mixer that she loses her thoughts, lets them get whisked up and spun apart by the hooks of the machine, counting every second rotation. She hums pleasantly under her breath - the first and only bit of music she had ever composed, deeply unhappy with the result and thus turning back to sheet music, but the melody still sticks to her fingers on the nights she takes up her viola and attempts to re-write, change, do better with the tune. (It's remained untouched for twenty years.)

She abandons hours in the creation of Dutch wedding cookies, then unsalted bread the next evening, and a marbled coffee cake the next.

Sherlock, weeks later, takes one look at Mycroft and comments on the stress of her jacket buttons, and when she's back at her flat, she carefully sweeps the remains of her lemon tarts and chocolate shortcake in to the bin under the sink, returning to her study, her wars and her bombs and her negotiations and she resolutely avoids her kitchen for weeks, instead letting her fingers itch toward her viola.

 

 

Mycroft hides tripwires in her words, has known how to do so since she was a young woman but ever day it gets easier, she gets more slippery, she takes entire lives and twists them in to knives that hurt, trivializes people to get what she wants. She knows people. She knows language. It's been years since she's been able to speak freely, hasn't had to layer her words over each other, twisting and braiding what she really means with the polite threats delivered along side a mirthless smile.

It shouldn't give her a childish delight when Sherlock susses out exactly what she means, rolls his eyes as he listens to her on her mobile outside his door. Cuts her back. She misses this, because there is something inherently lonely about her flat at night when there is no one who understands her - when there is no one.

"You'll do a search on Sherlock's flat this week," she tells Lestrade, pacing the length of his small office. He seems unnerved by her, leaning over his desk with his hands on the side of his face; tired, only about...four hours of sleep, worrying no doubt over his cases, or the wife who he had dinner with last night but didn't return home with him - Mycroft politely clears her throat, and sets down the second coffee she had brought with her.

"Are you asking, or telling?" It should be more hostile than it comes out, and Lestrade's aware, shuffles the folder open in front of him to cover the lack of venom.

It isn't envy, but it's very close, and Mycroft wonders what it would be like to actually let such things seep in to a voice. To be able to clip out the shards of glass - for tripwires to be deactivated, knife blades dulled or sharpened by emotion. She doesn't let the convoluted envy show on her face, nor in the tight, controlled grip of her hand on her umbrella.

"Detective, you need my brother. I am quite positive you would have several more open cases that would be keeping you awake even more so than they do now - and that, coupled with your...delicate living situation, wouldn't be conducive to effective work, I imagine." Mycroft doesn't have to push the coffee cup across the desk between them, her words do so enough for her.

"What do you care, though?" Lestrade pauses to sniff at the cup, lifting it to his mouth with the caution of a man who suspects nothing less than to be drugged and kidnapped. Again. It isn't meant to be hurtful, his question - he asks with complete and utter curiosity.

Mycroft shifts her jaw back and forth, lips pursing slightly. "Sherlock has the capacity to do a great many things better than letting his brain rot. Cases...help. He could have been a chemist, a philosopher, perhaps even a concert violinist. He was always the better player, always enjoyed composing. I could never get the proper hang of it..." She gives a sniff, delicate, turning to look at the office floor beyond Lestrade's window, the gears and cogs of Scotland Yard shuffling about paperwork, answering phones. "He chooses this."

The look again. As if Lestrade could do what she and Sherlock did, with a glance, pull apart the threads of a personal life. It makes her want to, in equal parts, walk away and ask what he's deduced. It's almost a stroke to her ego when the line between his brows appears, the result of confusion, mystery - pieces of a puzzle so complex and large that no one has really ever attempted. Mycroft takes a modest amount of pride in being unreadable, in being a question mark at the end of a string of words.

"Right," Lestrade finally says, sitting back; Mycroft notices his small twitch, the ache to put his feet up and lean back as far as the cheap office chair will allow, but he shows a modicum of self-restraint, keeping his shoulders pulled back and posture straight. Always the professional. "I'll take a team down to Montague Street tomorrow."

"If you find anything, let me know immediately," and Mycroft is lifting a pen from Lestrade's desk, writing down her mobile's number on the back of his own cheap egg-white card.

"Do you need - "

Mycroft gives a simple, short laugh. "Don't be silly."

 

 

Mycroft was seven the first time she worried about Sherlock, a tiny pink ugly thing he was, so soft, and quite suddenly she was very aware of all the dangerous things in the world. All the things that not only _could_ harm, but were intent upon doing so.

She's thirty six when she first notices the effect this stress has on her. Mycroft is Atlas, of sorts, a government, a sphere of lives resting on the space between her shoulder blades. In the mirror, the sag and sallow of her face alarms her the moment she pauses to study. She looks...old.

One hand to the glass and the other against her cheek, she drags a finger down the slope, the humorless lines that form the valley against her nose. Her father's nose. Her thumb rests in the dip of her chin, hates it for a hot second before drifting to her lips, pulling down to accentuate the lines of a smoker; a disgusting habit, she'd picked it up her summer abroad in Berlin, and hid it well, letting the addiction swirl down in to a dull ache that she feels pride in repressing, and indulges in very rarely.

A nail is scratched lightly over the few scars from teenaged acne that she hadn't let heal, the only thing that marred her skin beside the odd patch of freckles here and there across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are dark, she knows how to twist them in to terrifying things if the situation requires, knows the delicate way to raise one eyebrow in doubt to inspire the same feeling in someone else; her mouth contorts so easily in to a confident smirk, then just as quickly a slight frown. Acting is a facet of her career so much as intelligence is required, a diplomatic attitude that fronts a strong aggression. Mycroft Holmes isn't passive or easy or to be manipulated and it reads in the curve of her brow, pursed lips, intent stare. She at once looks fifty and thirty two, more lines and pronounced gray hair the only things properly missing. She has perhaps always looked this age, somewhere between young and old, for years now, but it's only just now she properly pays attention to it. Mycroft lets her hand drift across her cheek for a second longer before popping open the medicine cabinet and carrying on.

 

 

The next time she sees Lestrade, he pulls from the confines of doctorly hands and bandages, and Mycroft would have smirked if it weren't her brother who had put him there. She continues to keep her distance at the hospital for another ten minutes, surveying the sky outside left black without a moon, and turns her attention back to the happenings on the gurney just as the detective manages to get to his feet.

"You should listen to them, Greg, that cut on your head will need stitches - at least three."

Lestrade pauses, focusing on her now in the way she had intended; the eyes of someone noticing a painting on the wall that's always been there. Her ability to blend in, hide, stand back and survey situations. She likes it.

"Sherlock bleeding Holmes will be the death of me," he grits out after a minute of silence, and when he sits back down the doctor lets loose an almost visible sigh.

"If I had thought that guns were to be brought in to the altercation..." She pulls closer a wooden visitors chair, placing it just far away enough from the bed to be considered distant, to not interfere with the bustle of the nurses, the reaching for gauze and scissors. She tugs from her breast pocket her small silver watch though it's hardly necessary - she's aware of the time, she always is, finding thin black hands from the corner of her eye, she could tell you the discrepancies between the clocks in the hospital on every floor because they all clicked a minute apart from each other, knew which floor had the correct time. Knew that in seven hours, Lestrade would be expected to _not_ show up at the office, forced in to a day off after a hospital visit and a prescription filled. In nine hours, Mycroft herself would have to be on a plane - Russia, the Russians were always so temperamental, they wanted face to face confrontation, thought they could intimidate... Mycroft does her own equivalent of shaking her head, a small roll of the eyes at her watch, pocketing the heirloom just as Lestrade's caretakers step back.

Neither of them says a word. Mycroft drags her eyes across Lestrade as he stretches his back, the crack crack crack of a different position; he groans and thinks she doesn't notice, but it takes the time for her to sweep a hand through her short hair and rest it in her lap to tell that he hasn't slept a full night's worth in three days, that the soup he made in the Scotland Yard kitchen was spilled but not eaten, and, if left to his own devices, it'll be forty five minutes before he'll give in and smokes his first cigarette in two weeks. Lestrade continues to be an open book, and it's reassuring.

To Mycroft, who can pull apart the threads of Lestrade like a beaded curtain, people aren't boring in the way they are to Sherlock. People are ordinary so much of the time that when they _are_ unpredictable, when they move suddenly against the grain, it's something to be paid attention to, to be logged. Sherlock spends so much time avoiding people because he hasn't yet seen them be anything other than completely and utterly boring.

People have done nothing but hurt Sherlock, a fact that Mycroft suddenly hates as she catalogues this man, this one human being who has not yet done so. Mycroft muses on a knighthood for some few minutes before dismissing the idea - to do so would show her hand to Sherlock, give away just how closely she's watched his going ons. Guarded him. Maybe just a promotion in the future, then.

"Come with me, Detective. You haven't eaten since your toast and strawberry jam this morning, and while there's no more apt place than a hospital to drop from malnourishment, I would rather avoid the hassle altogether."

Wordlessly, Lestrade follows when Mycroft stands, leads the way out of the ward and to her car outside, a small turn of the lips that can barely be categorized as a smile given to Anthea, who stands waiting.

"At least this time you didn't kidnap me," Lestrade concedes, head tipping when the door opens as if to say, _ladies first._ Mycroft watches Lestrade in a much less conspicuous manner than he manages to do himself, his gaze made a tad frantic by lack of sleep and too much coffee and alarm, even though they were in no way headed toward the factory-laden district of London. No large empty car parks here. It's a long wait for Lestrade to say anything, glancing across the seat divider to Anthea who hadn't made a sound. "Assistant?" he asked, aimed toward her.

When Anthea doesn't so much as turn an eye to Lestrade, Mycroft laughs and it draws his attention, expression something akin to suspicion. "My assistant, yes. She's a bit focused, do forgive her." Her lips purse, and she crosses a leg while still maintaining eye contact, though even if she weren't watching him, his grimace would be unmistakable when he shifts to the side. "I'm sure she has something that could help with the pain, if it's an issue." She never quite knows how to go about offering help, having not really ever done so; when Sherlock was small, he pulled away, insisted on watching his scratches ooze and bleed, the way the skin tore and pulled when he dragged his finger across it. When he was seven he had gone an entire afternoon without mentioning his broken wrist, declaring to a fourteen year old Mycroft with morbid delight that he could feel the bones grating and grinding together when he twisted the joint back and forth.

Without waiting for an answer, Anthea's shaking out a pre-determined amount of pills in to her hand, pressing them carefully in to Lestrade's palm. It's maybe a testament to his exhaustion that he doesn't even think about popping them in his mouth and swallowing, dry, his throat working longer than normal. Mycroft pointedly looks away.

"So why am I here?" Lestrade's a polite man but Mycroft appreciates the frankness, the dazed look to his eye, the way he grits his teeth and flexes his jaw as if he bites twice as many different words that he wants to say to her.

"I'm not in the habit of running police officers to the ground, though I can't say the same for my brother. Think of it as..." she pauses artfully, the kind of pause one learns from enabling it in many conversations, a manipulative moment of silence, "an apology and a thank you."

"I don't think he needs anyone to do his apologizing for him."

Mycroft's smile is a small, contained one that she absorbs in to the motion of parting her lips. "No, but I find many less bridges are burnt beyond use this way. Something about no man being an island." She hesitates in her next sentence, and it's a true hesitation, not one structured to unsettle someone, to leave them waiting. To turn them over an open flame. "He sees very little use in other people. He doesn't wait to see what makes them extraordinary. I'm not sure I understand why he's not cast you to the side yet, but I've heard him say" (a liberty, on Mycroft's behalf, given that she had only heard the muttering as she sat at a patisserie which was all the better to spy on Sherlock from) "that you're the best of the dreadful lot at Scotland Yard."

Lestrade blinks, rolling forward easily with the motion of the car stopping. "Huh."

The cafe is one of Mycroft's favorites when she chooses to sit and watch the city, meet her eyes and ears, can't stand to stare at the artwork from her father's study that she had had brought to her home. It's quiet when she needs it to be, and the doors will wordlessly lock and the lights will go out when she nods a certain way; the power still appalls her, sits around her collar and shoulders like the too large wedding dress a mother bestows her daughter. She imagines one day she'll grow in to a comfortability with the idea of nearly commanding a nation, but for now she leaves her umbrella and assistant in her tinted car and gestures for Lestrade to sit across from her, has his coffee brought the way he prefers.

"Why am I shocked you know how I take my coffee?" he asks after a sip raises his eyebrows higher toward his hairline. Mycroft takes careful note not to smile, looking back toward the kitchen and surveying the empty tables between it and the bay window.

"I just observe." It's sentimental, Mycroft thinks, even in such a small measure, to favor this cafe when she knows that she would do better not to have a routine, to be unpredictable and pragmatic. She knows that if an attempt were to ever be made on her life, it would be useful to make it harder on the poor soul. She can't find it within her to care at the moment, though, watching Lestrade gulp down a second cup of coffee and not touching her tea.

"How's your head doing?" she asks politely, flipping over a menu and sliding it across the table between them. "I can't imagine taking the handle of a gun to the head as pleasant."

"Not more than a headache that'll be hell in the morning, but I don't want to know what it was your assistant gave me, or how you got it, because I'm sure it'll just bristle the officer in me." Lestrade has a smile tugging at the edge of his mouth, and it helps Mycroft understand his age, a face that quite suddenly seems as if it had never had a line to it at all. Mycroft laces her fingers together in front of her, looking out the window and across the street.

"You never mentioned what you do for a living," Lestrade says after a minute of silence, accepting the third cup placed in front of him wordlessly and Mycroft finally dips her spoon in to her tea, swirling the lukewarm milk. "I've asked Sherlock, but he just laughed at me, said I'd do better to ask you myself, but wanted me to tell him what you said ' _this_ time'."

"I suppose you could say I have a minor position in the government. An office job. Paperwork, boring meetings, those sort of things." Nowhere near the truth Lestrade wanted, of course. But the truth, the full truth, was unnecessary. Besides, she did have quite a bit of paperwork to sort through every day, so it wasn't a total lie.

"See, I don't think office workers have tinted bulletproof cars and the ability to kidnap people off streets left and right," Lestrade counters easily - once again, there's no actual hiss or bite to his words, curiosity and some warped seed of respect in his chest as he addresses her. Mycroft finds she likes it more than she should, and raises two fingers in the air to beckon over a waitress.

"Working for Queen and country for over a decade does lend itself to some perks, would you not think?" she smiles.

"See, I asked about you, at the Yard. Thought maybe you'd turn up if you'd kidnapped someone before - "

"That's really not fair, seeing as I hardly forced you against your will, nor did I tie you up, take you hostage, demand any amount of money."

" - and definitely something would come up if you were anything like your brother, which I suspect you are, touch of the dramatic and all. I got three nervous laughs, two quick changes of conversation, and one grimace. I was told you were colder than bloody December without a jacket, and," now Lestrade leans back, his fingers twitching (Mycroft's distracted him from his cigarette, he would have had one lit by fifteen minutes ago, and the nicotine patch that presses an outline to his sleeve every time he shifts is by now useless), "I was told that if I valued my job, I'd keep my head down and agree with whatever you said when you came round. So that paperwork you're shuffling across your desk must be very important indeed."

Finally, Mycroft lets her smile go. "My job keeps me busy."

"But not busy enough that kidnapping - "

"Ah, ah."

"...picking people up off the street has become a hobby in your spare time."

"That and cooking. I find one doesn't get me in nearly as much trouble as the other."

 

 

When Mycroft is twenty four, she's propositioned to marry. He's a banker, bright eyed, craves his spot in Canary Wharf and wants to keep himself in diamond cuff links until the day he dies. He wants a Holmes on his arm to add an old name's prestige to his career. But more than that, he wants Mycroft seen and not heard, wants to put her in dresses and painful heels and have her learn how to host the perfect dinner party and coordinate her lip stain to her painted nails. Mycroft recognizes instantly that he wants her to become her mother.

She doesn't even have to think about it. She stands defiantly in front of her father and raises her chin as she says, "I'm not going to become like Mummy" - he has his hand in the air before she even finishes speaking, a crack against her cheek and a stunned look in her eye as he falls back against his leather desk chair. Without a word, Mycroft calmly walks out of Siger Holmes' study and to her room, immediately gathering her clothes and books to settle in a lopsided pile on her pillow as she tugs her travel trunk from under the bed where it had been shoved not a week earlier when she'd returned from London.

She hears Sherlock standing in her doorway for a full minute before he clears his throat, ambling in with the satisfied air of someone who has complete control of his long, graceful limbs. She hates it, a bit. She's not at all shocked to watch him turn open her windows and swing them outward, sitting on the ledge as he holds a cigarette between his lips and lights it. She doesn't caution him against blowing smoke at her curtains, or ashing on her sill and staining the paint - it would be purely hypocritical of her, seeing as she knows Sherlock could smell the smoke in her clothing and hair years and years ago, when hugging had not been beyond the realm of their relationship.

"He's a bastard, Mycroft."

She snorts; they had never been a pair to mince words, to waste them when a look or a smirk or a glare would do. "If this is your attempt to console me, you'll have to do a bit better than that."

"You would be a terrible wife to the poor sod, anyway."

Mycroft pauses, setting the last of her books spine up in her trunk and then turning. She takes the room in four wide steps and pinches the cigarette from Sherlock's lips, crossing her feet where she stands and inhaling. It'd been too long since her last, the smokers of London taunting her at the corner of every street - they might as well be blowing smoke in her face.

"I would, wouldn't I? Dinner parties bore me, I'd want to keep my name, and it would be a cold day in hell before I gave up my career - "

"You mean give up being unofficial queen."

"I don't run England."

"Not yet."

"He'd want more than I could give, essentially."

Sherlock slips a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights another one, almost a full minute passing before he speaks again. "That implies that you have those things in you to give. I'm not sure you do."

"Do you think there's something wrong with me?" Mycroft's voice is so level that she thinks she has her answer right there, and her hand stops in the air on its way to inhale again.

"That would mean something's wrong with me, too."

"That's not an answer."

"Wasn't meant to be."

 

 

Mycroft feels a bit like God, legs stretched out under her desk with options and decisions and lives laid before her in manila folders, and shuffling them this way and that does no good, because the problem with God is that no one ever attributes the good with Him. They always ask Him why. They always blame Him for death. Destruction. Harm. Hurt. They will always blame her, no matter what.

Mycroft grinds her fingers against her scalp on the crown of her head and closes her eyes, leaning as far back as she can. She's positive that other thirty six year olds don't feel this way, but she's still not entire sure she would trade it. Her answer lies somewhere in the bottom of her crystal decanter, the stopper heavy in her hand as she tugs it out.

"I'm not going to ask how you managed to worm your way in through my security, but really, you're not above the front door."

Sherlock snorts, an unbecoming sound, and presses her study door further open. "You should let the guard know that the third camera's bolts need tightening, it's much too easy to create a blind spot by just knocking in to that tree once or twice."

Mycroft rolls her eyes almost audibly, leaning back against her desk and flipping over the paperwork, sliding it face down and backwards in to her left hand drawer. "I assume you need something, but it's entirely plausible that you just want to waste my time."

"Do the office hours ever end, sister of mine?"

Sherlock looks like something left behind in a hospital morgue, and the only word that comes to mind is "bruised" which - it fits. Mycroft clucks her tongue softly and thinks no word has ever fit her brother better. She counters his question patiently, asking, "When was the last time you slept, Sherlock?" Setting down her class and stepping back over to her decanter, pouring a finger's worth of dark liquor and holding it out for her brother. She had never quite enjoyed the descriptor "waxen" when it came to someone's complexion, but it was apt when she studied his face closer, his legs at odd and broken angles across the floor in front of his chair, slumped and careless. Somewhere in the space of time since they had last seen each other, he had abandoned his posture and manners. Mycroft had read, had seen - were she unable to contain the motion, her shudder would have been delicate.

"It's all unnecessary. Food. Sleep. Medicine. It's tedious." Sherlock sniffs, turning his head and giving Mycroft his profile, chin raised. Shadows fall from his cheekbones, high and sharp and too deep. She looks away, setting the rejected glass somewhere to her left, taking back up her own and holding it to her mouth.

"I don't know where this devil may care attitude about your wellbeing originated, but it's dangerous." She levels him with a look, taking a moment to let the meanings between what she's said and what she's about to separate like oil and water. Made clear, at least, to Sherlock. "It is dangerous."

It takes a moment, but Sherlock pulls himself up so effortlessly that it's as if a marionette had brought him back to life on wire strings. His hands come up to knot in his messy hair, and he grinds his feet in to the carpet, knees locked at ninety degree angles. "It's so...irritatingly loud, in my head, completely unused machinery going to waste, I will _rust_ , I will - will rot in to abandoned disuse, Mycroft, you don't understand - "

Mycroft's smile masks her uneasiness, and if there's a sad edge to it, Sherlock hasn't looked up and caught it yet. "Don't I?" She stands, smoothing her hand over the wrinkled front of her skirt, readjusting the rumpled sleeves of her dress shirt as she resumes her seat behind her desk. "You could do anything you want except perhaps a television or radio personality - that would require a less prickly one and we both know that isn't a trait most Holmes carry naturally. Sherlock." Mycroft steeples her fingers and rests them in front of her mouth, clearing her throat. She would hate Sherlock in that moment if he didn't look so sick and...bruised. The word comes back, matches the circles under his eyes, the shadow against his neck. He had never had dark eyes, always crystalline and the absolute envy of everyone, but now they could have been black. Glazed. Drugged.

"You are so brilliant, Sherlock, and you waste yourself - "

"And how would you have me spend my time, hm, would you rather I sit behind desks and judge and control and do nothing, because I will tell you, Mycroft," Sherlock stands, venom, spitting, practically hissing and were Mycroft younger, were she not used to it, she would flinch, "I would waste myself on cocaine and die in a street than at the helm of bloody queen and country. Like you. You're the waste, signing your name all day, never actually using your mind."

Mycroft doesn't breathe. Her fingers barely even clench at the glass she's wrapped a hand around, the one whose glint she's now studying with interest, like no conversation is happening at all. Like Sherlock isn't even there.

"You - it could be argued that you're more brilliant than I, certainly going by that bloody test we were made to take as children - it would only be more of an insult if you married, popped out a few children, wasted away in a kitchen, but we both know that that's never going to be an option for you, is it?"

Mycroft gives a laugh, surprised and pleasant. "You think I'm going to be hurt that you throw insults at something I lack? Something I don't crave in the first place? You really are gone. We're aware maternity was never my strong suit. Sherlock, you - "

He's gone before Mycroft can even look up, curling her lip in distaste at the slight slam her study door makes against the wall in Sherlock's wake.

"Ma'am?" Anthea's heels click, muffled by rug, and come to a stop at the open door, Blackberry down for a change.

Mycroft makes a soft sound of acknowledgment, hand falling to the desk drawer she had slid her paperwork in, never actually looking up. "Yes, you're done for the evening, thank you," she says softly after a moment, but Anthea doesn't move.

"Ms. Holmes."

"Everything is fine," Mycroft says almost immediately, giving a terse but well-fabricated smile toward her assistant. "I appreciate the concern but everything is managed, I'll need you at the office at nine to discuss Russia - again, they think a bullheaded approach to trade embargoes will actually get them somewhere..." she drifts off, fingers resting against her mouth, and when she looks up, Anthea only nods.

"Of course, ma'am. Have a good evening." Anthea's tone is reassuringly flat and empty; Mycroft is suddenly grateful for the woman as the door gently snaps shut, and she stands again, turning to the window at the far wall.

She wants to believe she can see the dark shadow of Sherlock stalking the pavement outside, waiting for the black cabs he's so fond of - public transportation is sensory overload, a feeling that Mycroft is all too common with, and really does nothing more than provide three times the head ache it does normal commuters. She watches the shadow disappear inside a cab and pull away and it's only then she looks down at the pack of cigarettes she'd pulled from the desk drawer. Back ups, just in case, just in case of sudden nuclear war, or nights like tonight. Nuclear war or Sherlock.

Mycroft sends a quick apology to England, but sometimes Sherlock is the more trying of the two.

She slips the pack in her vest pocket, and instead walks back, picking up her mobile phone.

"Detective Lestrade. I'm so terribly sorry to bother you this late. I'm afraid I've got to ask you to keep a lookout for Sherlock this evening."

 

 

Mycroft is thirty one the first time Sherlock overdoses. Sherlock isn't even in the country when it happens and Mycroft flies to Prague to wait at a bedside, paperwork open on her lap and reading glasses on the edge of her nose until the moment Sherlock groans, awake.

It happens again, two years later. Mycroft does the same, stays awake on surprisingly adequate hospital coffee and Sherlock doesn't speak to her, doesn't take the slim black trousers and button down she leaves in the bureau, signs himself out while she's at her office. It's infuriating, maddening to Mycroft, but Sherlock either can't or doesn't care and leaves her no word, no forwarding address, no phone number - Mycroft acquires the last two easily and Sherlock is aware of the fact, but, she thinks, it's the principle of the matter. Just common courtesy.

"He's brilliant which is maybe why I understand it," Lestrade says sagely, if not a worn edge to his voice. He slumps, Mycroft notices, the very top of his shirt pulled open - stress wrinkles around the button, so tugged at, not the casual routine of his every night, the loosening of a tie, slow unbuttoning and untucking.

Well, she amends with her lips to the styrofoam coffee cup in her grip, it wouldn't be a routine evening, would it?

"Hm," Mycroft sounds noncommittally. Too hot. She drops the cup to the table between them and gives Lestrade a sidelong glance; his legs stretch out in front of him in the hallway but he pulls them back quickly when a nurse walks past. Polite.

"Sherlock. He's brilliant. Really, the both of you are, but there's something about brilliance..." Lestrade's sigh is harsh, loud, the edge of cigarette smoke apparent. Quitting again. They're both aware there's very little use sitting outside Sherlock's room but they do it anyway. Mycroft is loathe to admit to sentiment but she's got her work with her and since a charitable donation to the hospital two years ago the sitting chairs are considerably more comfortable. She keeps her head firm against the hard wall behind them just in case she's tempted in to sleep by plush cushioning.

"Believe me. I'm entirely aware." Mycroft takes her briefcase from her lap and sets it against the leg of her chair, one ankle pressed against it protectively. In its place are now her folded her hands, fingers locked. "Somewhere between the few points' difference in our IQ is...well. Apparently a profound understanding of people. Humans. The ability to get along with them and understand them." She sighs. "I don't envy him it. I'm very lucky. The greatest aid in complete loneliness is genius."

"Cheery pair, you two are," Lestrade laughs. It's low, hardly amused, but it's there nonetheless and eases a line of tension pulling Mycroft's shoulders back. She runs a hand through her hair, easing her fringe back and behind one ear.

"It's genetic. A morbid cheeriness," she jabs back, crossing her legs and tugging along the pressed line of her trouser. "Visiting hours have ended, Detective, if you wish to leave. Return home. I'm sure you've had a long day - "

"You would know, I'm sure, if you wanted to see the files," Lestrade grumbles.

"Minor positions in government often have to fill their days somehow." Mycroft's smile is secretive but entirely pleased, returned with a similar smirk on Lestrade's own mouth. "Regardless, I doubt anything will different from the previous hospital stays if Sherlock wakes tonight."

" _Previous_? This isn't the first time this has happened?" Lestrade sits up, casting a dark glare to the closed door of Sherlock's room.

"Indeed," Mycroft says. All the tension she had let leave cleaves back to her, spine straight and neck rigid, lips pressed thin.

Lestrade looks as if he doesn't know quite what to do with the information, anger and incredulity and an impossible sadness flickering across his face all in the span of a second. Mycroft sincerely hopes he hides his emotions better on the job, anyone with half the ability of a Holmes would read him like a flashing gaudy sign. "Has he always been like this?"

"I'd ask what you mean by 'this', but. I understand." Mycroft clears her throat a little, pulling on the cuff links of her sleeves and dropping them in to one palm slowly. "He was always very...well. I agree with you. There's a sort of mature, wizened sorrow that comes along with knowing a substantial amount, understanding a good deal of the world around you. It's nearly unbearable, but a complete paradox. To have such a mind is maddening, but to ignore it, to not use it, is just the same. You're pinned." Her grin is a tad bitter, mirthless. The same grin she's worn for years. "I don't think people quite understand that. That it's a compulsion and as uncontrollable as breathing. And maybe Sherlock was on to something, giving his control away. Surely losing such a mind would be a reprieve."

Lestrade says nothing. He says nothing for a long time, until Mycroft is sure she's said too much; men are always quite fickle about emotions, she muses, so much more so than women who let them free easier but seem just as embarrassed by them.

Not for the first time, she wonders if there's maybe something wrong with her.

"I'm sorry."

Mycroft almost thinks she didn't hear it at all, because when she looks over Lestrade hasn't moved an inch at all, slumped as if his strings had been cut loose - the way she feels at three in the morning wherever it is she happens to be. Once, 3 am hit her square in the chest at 2 pm in a conference room in Sydney and she had to excuse herself for a minute, an embarrassing minute. Mostly she just quells it with a glass of whiskey.

The corner of his mouth (it's very small, his mouth, not at all proportionate to the rest of his face but it not jarring, Mycroft thinks, and has to set that thought aside quickly, the inside of her chest tightening a bit) twitches, though. It twitches and she accepts the unnecessary apology without a word. She holds her coffee to her lips for a minute, all the heat having left it as she spoke, and brings it back down with a sigh. "I think I wanted tea, anyway."

"I'll come with you. Probably won't be sleeping tonight anyway, an empty bed'll do that to you." The signs, of course, are all over him, and quite obvious, but of the two Holmes Mycroft had clearly been graced with more tact and an ability to know when a topic was to be politely avoided.

Mycroft was eleven when she first realized something about her mind was different than everyone else, but she was thirteen when she learned that a properly done cup of tea fixed that feeling, stuffed it quickly back in like a receipt in a wallet. Before she made it for herself, Mummy would brew and pour a cup for the both of them, occasionally joined by Siger Holmes himself when the mood struck him, always a splash of milk and never any of the sugar that Mycroft desperately made a pout for. On most days, milk and two sugars elicits a comforted sigh from Mycroft but on bad days when it’s too early an hour for whiskey, Anthea preemptively has a cup waiting on the corner of the desk, set pointedly on top of the day's files and paperwork, as if a medication administered with the instructions of ingesting before a meal.

If ever there were a three sugar night, it would absolutely be tonight. The hospital cafeteria is nearly empty, a few employees pushing around mops slowly and a table of three nurses produce the only other talking heard in the room, echoing from the linoleum and metal staircase and plain white walls. Mycroft steeps her tea slowly like there isn't a world out there needing her signature, as if her brother isn't upstairs hating her through a drug induced weekend of unconsciousness - as if nothing is more pressing or urgent than the Tetley's and sugar packets in her hand. Absentmindedly she presses their shape in to the palm of her hand as Lestrade's chair scrapes against linoleum; positioned directly across from her, he can see more than when they sat side by side and she adjusts her body language accordingly. Wall after wall is put up like sand bags before a flood.

She says, "You really are free to go home, Lestrade," and he chases her words with, "Call me Greg." It puts a small twist of a smile on her lips. "I mean it, Sherlock won't be alone when he wakes up and if it's the evidence he's gathered that you're after, my assistant will let you in to his flat on Montague Street and you're free to take anything you want."

Lestrade is already shaking his head before she's finished, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. "I've got personal stock in that git, I can only imagine the level of frustration he brings me is something like a son would, if I had one. Or started early."

"So you don't have children?"

"You knew that already." His tone is almost admonishing and Mycroft pauses with her stirring stick ground against the side of her cup.

"People like to let their secrets, their lives, come at their own pace, even if I'm already aware of them. Puts them off if you...well, act as Sherlock does about it." Mycroft's shrug is nonchalant, but she won't look up, suddenly very intent on dissolving every granule of sugar. She had learned the hard way that her deductions were to be kept to herself as a child, the hurt and betrayal and insult in their eyes that stemmed from being clear print words on a page to her. Her mother had jerked her by the arm and pressed her mouth to her ear, muttering, "save that knowledge. It's more useful than you'll know when you first gather it."

She really does owe all her blackmailing talent to Mummy.

"Well, I didn't really think it would be that fair. Copper dad gets shot, leaves wife with group of children. She always wanted them, though."

"Yes, but you thinking it was a bad idea is neither a yes or a no to whether or not you wanted them."

"You didn't ask me whether I wanted them, though!"

"You should have known I was going to ask. Not nearly as sharp as I'd thought you were." Mycroft deliberately injects humor in to her words, a jest. Just to be sure it's taken as such, she adds a small smile, too fast, one rehearsed and practiced and perfected years ago. Dealing with other people somehow felt like having to reach in to a velvet bag blindly and pull out a response with a prayer that it was the right one. She's good at the game, having learned the contents of the bag; Sherlock, though, is dreadful at it, always seeping at the seams with emotion he tries to deny, emotion he isn't aware of. Isn't prepared for.

Lestrade hasn't spoken. Instead he leans back a little in to the creak of the plastic chair, features lost to the cloudiness of thought. (How nice, Mycroft thinks, not to be moderately embarrassed by that sound of strain in the silence between them, to not even let it cross your mind, and the muscles in her thighs tense, posture straightening a fraction of an inch.) She waits for his answer, a hand held over the steam of her tea to dampen her palm, then dragging her fingertips dried by paperwork through the dew as she waits.

She already knows the answer, it's always the same. _Do you want children, of course I do someday, I_ -

"Not really I suppose. Thought it'd be different if they were my own but I don't know. They've always got sticky fingers." As if by demonstration, he rubs the fingers of one hand together and Mycroft laughs again - genuine, shocked, not the one she's tailored like a designer to fit with social politeness.

"Children are the future, or so every says. Furthering the name. The greatest thing a woman can do," Mycroft says, an air of mockery to her voice, and a hint of bitterness she's sure only she can detect. She punctuates it with raised eyebrows, finally taking a sip of her tea.

"I don't know that London could take another Holmes," Lestrade says darkly.

"I think we both have our useful moments. Me more so than my brother, I'll admit."

"He does alright, I'll give him that. Puts in a lot of work. More than some of my own, I'll say."

And that's the thing, Mycroft muses, twirls the idea through her fingers like a coin with ridges she explores. If she's the theory, the guide, the step by step, then surely Sherlock is the execution. Sherlock is each step acted upon. Where she is the gathered data, he is the actual explosion, the chemical reactions, the contents of the beaker.

Sherlock would like that thought, would have agreed were he younger. Before Europe, maybe. Before Montague Street. This time he isn’t off to cross a border, there’s an address Mycroft can pin him to and it gives her peace of mind, that she can pull up security footage of Sherlock scowling at every camera as he stalks the crowd of Trafalgar.

Mycroft manages not to fall asleep at hospital, but only barely; Lestrade doesn't shake her awake but he claps his hands together as he announces his departure, the sound echoing throughout the corridor loud enough to make Mycroft blink furiously and straighten her spine, a tighter grip on the files she had been studying.

"I'd better head off as well," she agrees, shaking a fob watch out of her pocket and narrowing her eyes at the hands as if it were their fault that time continued to go too fast. "Always paperwork for a minor government worker to be done." At that, Lestrade snorts but has an undeniable grin threatening to break loose.

She extracts a hand from her jacket pocket to extend to Lestrade when he sweeps forward, a stutter start to his movement, and his mouth is against hers.

Mycroft is twenty one the first time someone kisses her and the experience is so unpleasing that she escorts the boy to his car herself and says goodbye in the curt slam of his car door for him. She has never liked the split second before closing the space between her lips and someone else's. Their face, so close to hers, so open and wanting, makes her stomach flip a little bit with more than just understandable nerves. She almost thinks of street beggars holding a hand out for change and something in her, a string of patience pulled taut, is cut just a little short. She's never enjoyed kissing.

It's a shame, she thinks, that she can't enjoy this, the very moment of Lestrade pressing in against her, because he's warm and his hands are thick in a way hers aren't (bad circulation through too-thin fingers) and he would look almost peaceful if she weren't reminded of outstretched hands asking her for more than she can really give.

The moment, though, passes. Mycroft isn't sure if Lestrade keeps his hands gently on her shoulders because he's aware she can demote him with a sigh or if he's actually respectful of women but something in Mycroft's chest wants to burst out a spit of delighted laughter at the idea

“A bad idea?” He asks, a slight crinkle to his eyes, something about age and life experience lending itself to a lesser degree of worry about rejection past the age of forty, past a failed marriage, past an estranged wife, leaving just the honest question of his curiosity, and Mycroft smiles at him.

“Absolutely. But they are, from time to time, inevitable, and because of that...it’s usually a good idea to rush ahead with a bad idea.”

The hospital staff buzz around, skirting a circle around the chairs beside Sherlock Holmes' hospital room and it's almost nice, in a sense, Mycroft thinks as she picks up her leather briefcase with her jacket flung over an arm. Watches Lestrade give her a small nod as he spins around on his heel once past the lift doors. She erases her name from news articles, is on no official payroll, has had her records sealed under lock and key (encrypted code after encrypted code, the modern equivalent), drives around London behind tinted bullet proof glass and heads a club exclusively of silence, of avoidance, of peace and quiet and paperwork and fine, fine scotch. She is ignored, acquiesced to, waved by with a hand of freedom because she wants to be.

Mycroft Holmes is thirty seven years old when she pulls out her desk chair, smoothing her hands across piles of foreign policies and treaties and grants, waits for the inevitable knock from Anthea that Sherlock has signed himself out of hospital, and truly knows what it is to get what she wants, to be invisible by choice. The way she likes it.


End file.
